I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
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Why The Apple vs Samsung Verdict Is A Big Mistake

PALO ALTO, CA - APRIL 28: An Apple Inc., employee holds the new white iPhone 4 at the Apple store April 28, 2011 in Palo Alto, California. The long awaited white iPhone, first announced in June of 2010, went on sale worldwide for the first time today. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

When I first bought an iPhone I thought: How beautiful and sleek – in fact the phone was so sleek it kept sliding out of my hand. Like most people who do not carry a handbag, I had to buy an ugly, black, plastic cover to stop me dropping it. My iPhone resided inside that case where nobody could see its sleek, rounded edges. To my surprise those edges made up part of the recent Apple vs Samsung infringement action. I say surprised but I mean astonished – how can anybody win a billion bucks for a design error? Or for that matter for being a trend setter?

But dare I say it – I rarely see an iPhone that is not encased. I rarely see one that is not hidden from view because of its impractical form (and wasn’t Steve Jobs promising free covers to help overcome a mic (sorry antenna)-design defect two years ago?) Still, it is a design icon and there is a cost of iconic status. People copy you, defects and all. Apple’s inability to deal with that should get us asking questions about its liberal arts credentials.

If Apple had really been in the design business then they’d have seen Samsung’s copy as sheer flattery (at least at the trade dress level) and moved on to the next iteration. Design is fashion, a peculiar form of intellectual property that wavers and transforms by the season.

In Brussels right now you can buy Pierre Marcolini’s autumn collection of chocolates. Since Marcolini began making single estate chocs, combining them with ingredients like Earl Grey tea, that fashion has swept through the chocolate making business. His neat idea of copying the seasonal element of fashion is also out there and copied. Marcolini is no longer alone in launching seasonal sweets.

But that’s trivial you might say…. not to Pierre though, I’m sure. And that is the central issue with ideas and designs. To a degree, they are shared property. On the bigger stage, in the fashion business, Zara is a b-school case study in how to copy catwalk design and to get them into the shop, pronto. Zara in fact has built a new retail business model around being deft enough with color and shape not to be a total copycat but to get close enough that buyers crave its goods, while the original is still fresh in people’s minds.

When the Duchess of Cambridge wears blue, knitted, shops fill with blue, knitted. Chinese car manufacturers are upbraided for copying the designs of western car makers. But take a look at the new Audis. Audi is the up and coming design house in autos but I happen to think their latest shapes are a rip off of Mercedes. There’s only so many ways you can do four wheels and a cabin (or cockpit I guess we should say).

Design is not invention. It arises from a common pool of creativity. I happen to think Apple’s icon designs are superlative but no more so than Chris Bangle’s designs for BMW – now take a close look at Opel, which are as similar to BMW as Audi are to Mercedes and not just because Opel designers finally know how to do curves – more importantly they have the technology to bend the metal like BMW does.

Apple deserves no kudos for taking the trade dress fight to the courts. Maybe if they were a bunch of losers whose design advantage had been unfairly appropriated and now they had no cash for the kids’ school fees, then there would be a cause for sympathy. But this is is the most valuable company in history. Mr Cook. Move on. Create.

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A bike nowadays can have many sellers and producers yet its key design holds two wheels and a frame, and this applies to almost anything and everything. The problem with Apple is that they don’t apparently see that some designs should be universal (color and shape) and that some designs aren’t, for example round edges on anything prevent irritation and yet location of cameras and charger size and just in turn what responds to said charger inside of the phone. This article doesn’t wreak of communism but the purist form of capitalism in a just way. A grocery store, in their humble splendor, is still a grocery store to every other grocery store in the world. And yet, we don’t burst anything apart because of it. This “patent” infringement should have been a no-brainer, should have been… also, sir, the most valued “tech” company is above all else either by software status: Windows or Linux (both serve almost all government infrastructure to the cyber world as well as treatment.) and for actual hardware: Dell (they provide hardware for said countries as services i.e. every level of the medical field. Apple is not really anything big, except to the masses.

yesterday the decision was made that apple won? why is this conversation being repeated I wonder, the news hit wired first, then i think fotune, then forbes.

I wonder why is this a debate, companies get sued lots of time, so what? Even if we look into current cases in court there will be a lot of them open awaiting trial for MSFT/GOOGLE/NEC/MOTOROLA/HP/DELL/APPLE/IBM then why this case is so interesting?

Seriously! You must be in Alaska and had a brain freeze. You read the entire article, did you not? Case closed. That is not to say author has a valid point. As I pointed in a post below, beautiful babies get wrapped in ugly blankets all the time, it just makes sense to protect them, so is your mobile phone.mi love apple designs, but loved T- mobile, so am stuck with Android for now. Even that is in a cheap $5 casing from amazon.

But come upgrade time, October 4th, or if apple stock hits $850, I can splurge on an unlocked liPhone 5 cash money and stay on T -mobile.

This case set a precedence for an entire industry. By validating that trade dress is patent-able and can carry ridiculous damages for something that was not original or truly invented by the patent holder, effectively holds and entire industry hostage to potential monetary or business level extortion.

I wonder how many of us when choosing an iPhone think, well that looks very much like the Apple one or the Nokia one even though it’s a whatever one. We buy something that catches the eye and does the job. Whether it has rounded corners or square corners really does’nt factor in to it. Small parts of designs are being remodelled or reinvented all the time as there is always going to be a limit as to how many ways something can be done.